Distraught woman finds mysterious library

Audrey Niffenegger/Abrams ComicA

THE NIGHT BOOKMOBILE
Audrey Niffenegger

A highly successful visual artist before she became a bestselling novelist with The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger is understandably drawn to graphic novels. Her newest, at 33 pages, is more a graphic novella, but it is rich in theme, atmosphere and the capacity to linger in a reader’s mind. That should almost be Reader, with a capital “R,” because Niffenegger’s tale of a distraught woman and a mysterious library is about reading as the actual point of living for its truest devotees. As the artist asks in her afterword, “What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever?”

That’s an image reminiscent of a scene (the old lady in a chair) in Goodnight Moon, a volume significantly displayed within this one. In fact, the bookmobile, which protagonist Alexandra first encounters at 4 a.m. one day while wandering the streets of Chicago after an argument with her lover, holds everything she has read since childhood, and nothing else. That is literally everything: her own diary is on a shelf, and the ephemera section includes all the cereal boxes she ever perused. (Like Dr. Who’s Tardis, the battered Winnebago holding Alexandra’s life—in a way Niffenegger means to be exactly analogous to the number of stories within a reader’s mind—is much, much larger on the inside than it appears from the outside.) Other named texts include The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells—fittingly so, since Bookmobile was inspired by a Wells tale.

The librarian informs Alexandra of the dusk-to-dawn operating hours, and invites her in to browse happily within her past. But soon the bell rings—it’s dawn—and Alexandra must leave. It is years before she stumbles upon the bookmobile again. “Have you ever found your heart’s desire and then lost it?” she asks. The rest of this disturbing and beautiful tale is about the price books exact in exchange for the pleasure they give, and the lengths to which we will go to pay it.
- BRIAN BETHUNE

GOLD DIGGERS: STRIKING IT RICH IN THE KLONDIKE
Charlotte Gray

Like the Klondike’s gold-laden streams, historians have been picking over the glory days of Dawson City, Yukon, for more than a century. The gold ran out long ago. Are there any stories left worth telling?

With Gold Diggers, Canadian biographer Charlotte Gray turns her formidable attention to the gold rush of 1896. Yet Pierre Berton’s Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, which first appeared over 50 years ago, still stands as the iconic popular history of that era. And the autobiography of his mother, Laura Beatrice Berton, I Married the Klondike, is equally dominant as a first-person account of life in post-boom Dawson City.

Despite all this competition from the Berton family, however, Gray manages a fresh approach to the well-told story of Canada’s most famous boom town.

Where Pierre Berton featured a “cast of major characters” that numbered nearly 50, Gray pares her attention down to just six key figures: prospector Bill Haskell, hotel owner Belinda Mulrooney, Jesuit priest William Judge, Mountie Sam Steele, British journalist Flora Shaw, and soon-to-be famous but struggling writer Jack London.

Freed from the obligation of having to tell the encyclopedic story of Dawson City’s meteoric rise and fall, the author uses her six Klondikers to reveal many untapped veins of historical interest. Of note, the competition in town was often as interesting, and fierce, as the competition in the gold fields to find the next productive mining claim.

Gray reveals a little-known ecclesiastical struggle over ministering to Dawson City’s sinful hordes. American and Canadian miners come into sharp conflict over which holiday—Independence Day or Victoria Day—should take precedence. She details the birth of a bitter rivalry between entrepreneur Mulrooney and mining magnate Big Alex McDonald.

And while Pierre Berton spent half a sentence on Shaw, the colonial correspondent for the Times of London, Gray provides a lengthy character sketch of this formidable woman and the surprising influence she wielded over Canadian government policy in the Klondike. The rush may be long over, but thar’s still plenty of story gold in them hills.
- Peter Shawn Taylor